Today, a large number of websites enable users to post their own content or submit references (such as hyperlinks) to content for display and/or use by others. Such User Generated Content (UGC) based sites tend to be vulnerable to many forms of abuse, including, but not limited to spam, slurs, impersonation, illegal activities, posting of adult or other improper content, copyright violations, harassment, hate speech, exploitation of minors, and so forth, just to name but a few examples. Search engines suffer from the same problems while displaying search results from websites that have been manually submitted to the search engine or automatically discovered by its crawlers.
Moreover, the ease in which a user might create multiple accounts and post abusive content that might be immediately visible to millions of users makes such UGC based sites prime targets for abusers. Systems that enjoy a high level of network traffic may be unable to afford the costs or time of having an administrator examine each posting of content for abuse. Hiring of administrators to perform such tasks might become cost prohibitive for large and very popular UGC sites. However, many of the traditional automatic content filtering mechanisms have been demonstrated to be either ineffective, and/or require large amounts of resources to review posted content to minimize false detections (e.g., improperly detecting or failing to detect abusive content).
Several of today's UGC sites attempt to empower viewers of the content to report abusive content. Unfortunately, some of these reporters of abuse may also select to abuse the reporting system by falsely reporting content, targeting specific users for attack, such as falsely reporting good content to have it deleted, or the like. In some instances, the reporters may even create multiple accounts and use them to falsely report content. In some cases, a reporter might use one account to generate the abusive content, and use another account to report the abusive content, so as to gain trust for the one account. If and when such individuals are detected, they may simply create yet another account under a different identity and continue with their abusive behaviors of either generating abusive content and/or falsely reporting content as abusive. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.